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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#251

Post by konart »

tzahola wrote: post #151
Ascetik wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>miss Google Reader Feedly

Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.

>there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually

That's not true at all. At least in the web version this was an option from the very beginning.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#252

Post by smarx007 »

amelius wrote: post #164
sdfjkl wrote: post #59

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. t…

> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways. Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.

Yahoo pipes did it before, now https://github.com/nblock/feeds was linked in this comment thread today.

I think the problem is that scraping everything except waywalled info may be legal (in Europe, at least) as long as it's for personal use, but may get you/me/whoever in trouble if we start redistributing that content in RSS feeds. Then again, most of the resources won't even bother if you scrape them into RSS unless they make money of ads (haha, find a resource that doesn't) or overload their servers. But IFTTT model might be a nice workaround where users actively need to use some community recipe to scrape and they assume responsibility.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#253

Post by JoshMnem »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #222
JoshMnem wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What limitations are those? HTML is great for what it's supposed to do (allow anyone to publish and distribute content online). RSS/Atom is great for what it does too.

I like html but a lighter format along the lines of TeX or something s-expression/indentation based would have been nicer

If you haven't seen them, you might be interested in Pug or Elm.

- https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html

- https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/creating-html-elements-and-us...

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#254

Post by thefringthing »

tzahola wrote: post #151
Ascetik wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>miss Google Reader Feedly

Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.

Pasting the feed URL into the search box works 100% of the time.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#256

Post by WhyDoPeople »

leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

This is essentially what killed off RSS from every day use. This is also what killed off Gopher when the Web came around.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#258

Post by samschooler »

Franciscouzo wrote: post #166
icebraining wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion. By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)

I use RSS for following YouTube channels, but the only problem I have is that I have to click on each video, I'd like a RSS client to create a custom playlist, at least for all the music videos. I used to use YouTube's email notifications, but they would skip some videos randomly, and I'd be left wondering what videos I missed.

I use Feedly for this exact thing! YouTube's recommendations were either distracting or just not relevant. Feedly embeds the video right in the reader so no going to YouTube even. And now I only get the videos I want to watch.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#259

Post by samschooler »

tzahola wrote: post #151
Ascetik wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>miss Google Reader Feedly

Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.

No, it is actually a RSS reader. It just tries to solve the information overload problem by curating the news sources for you. If you have a small number of sources you still can get to all of the information. In order to add a feed, just paste in the rss link and its in your reader.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#260

Post by [deleted] »

dleslie wrote: post #189
leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

And this is why Google Reader was amazing. There we were, my friends and I, reading RSS feeds and liking/sharing/commenting amongst ourselves. pours one out

[deleted]
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